Im currently making meshes of mechs for a game i want to make. My question is to keep poly counts lower, i am making the mech out of many smaller meshes and putting them together instead of one piece with many cuts and loops for detail. When i put them together, can they overlap and not cause problems? Like the head and neck, can i just push it into the torso to where its the proper height? Or does it need to be flush and not overlapping? Its on blender if it makes a difference.
If the mech is going to be an animated skeletal mesh, then you don’t need to worry about intersections at all. You might get a few artifacts with lighting or shadows, but they shouldn’t be very big or noticeable. If you are planning on having a static mesh that’s not going to be animated, and it’s going to receive baked lighting, it’s generally best to avoid intersections, especially in noticeable areas, but you still can use some intersections.
Don’t worry too much about keeping the polycount as low as possible if you are not making a mobile game. Desktop GPUs can handle a lot of geometry.
It will be animated. I havent looked too much into the animating part yet, i have alot of questions i want to ask before i do too much to the mesh so that i can build it with what it needs to be animated properly. Also, some of the mech would be a million times easier to make in several pieces. Ill post a picture of what ive gotten done so far in a few minutes. When i get home from work later ill ask my millions of questions haha
Sorry, i have to link to another forum talking about my mesh, i cant put an image in here. That forum seems to not get many responses. Question about keeping number of polys down. - Modeling - Blender Artists Community
Anyways, in this example i would like to make the head and collar separately and sink them into the torso mesh. If i have to edit an edge that is full of vertices because of loop cuts needed elsewhere, i dont even know how id do it and keep the edge straight.
For the lowpoly, you should be terminating most edge loops that is not effecting the shape or the silhouette of the mesh (you might want to keep some to help control shading or for animation or vertex painting or to keep it cleaner). The 5 or 6 you have along the side in particular.
If you really worry about efficiency, you may find that, in the end, once you’re done, you’ll get better performance if you collapse all the bits and pieces into a single Skin mesh, and weight 100% of the vertices in each piece to the particular bone that the mesh was attached to. As in, drawing a single Skin mesh with one bone index per vertex, is likely cheaper than drawing 100 little itty bits of meshes.
As far as edge loop termination, from what i see blender really doesnt like doing it, and i dont see any tutorials on how to do it. And jwatte, i havent gone far enough unto the modelling process to use bones and stuff yet haha. I have a general understanding of them but thats about it
Just merge vertices where you want an edge loop to end, and then select and delete the unneeded part of the loop.
Yes you can make meshes overlap with others. You won’t have any problems with making that work.
Awesome. Also, if my models look finished as low poly… do i even need a normal map?
depends on your art direction. It’s perfectly fine to make a non realistic stylized game that doesn’t require normal maps…
You can do some realistic stuff up to a certain point without normal maps, until you are working on something that needs a lot of detail that you cannot afford to do with simple geometry. Although normal maps on pretty much everything is the standard for realistic games today.
Your first finished game ready model doesn’t need normal maps, and it’s best to start with something simple when learning to bake normal maps.
